Shorecliff

by Ursula Deyoung

  “That’s fine. Caroline and I will play,” Aunt Rose announced.

  “And me?” Aunt Margery asked. “What will I do?”

  “Sit with the uncles,” Rose said, nodding over at them.

  “That’s all right. Margery can play for me,” my mother said.

  “But you’re much better than Margery,” Rose objected, frowning.

  “We’ll switch off,” said my mother. “There’s nothing wrong with three to a mallet.”

  Aunt Edie appeared at the door, and Isabella said at once, a smile twitching her lips, “Here comes Aunt Edie. She’s a mean hand at croquet, you know. Back in her glory days, she would play in the nationals. They used to call her Edie the Invincible. But sometimes they called her Edie the Skunk.”

  “Be careful,” Aunt Margery said. “You’re closer to the truth than you know. Edie used to beat us every time we played. Even Kurt—he used to be absolutely furious when she skunked him across the lawn. He would dedicate the game to getting his revenge, and so, of course, he always lost.”

  “Croquet, is it?” Edie asked, sweeping over the lawn. She wore a blue skirt and a strange green jacket, short and old-fashioned. Her nose traveled well before the rest of her body. “Is there a free mallet?”

  “The older generation can battle it out over the blue mallet,” Tom said. “But the rest go to us. Who wants green?”

  We paired off: Francesca with Charlie, Tom with Isabella, Philip with Fisher. Yvette was given a mallet to herself, which indicated not so much that the other cousins were being generous as that no one wanted to put up with her acerbic comments. Pamela and I got stuck with the crooked yellow mallet, identified by Tom as the runt of the litter. The wood of its handle had warped, and whenever you hit a stroke with it, the ball inevitably curved left.

  “But we’ll lose!” I protested.

  “Just take the warp into account,” said Tom, dismissing me.

  “What does it matter?” said Pamela. “We would have lost anyway. This way we have an excuse.”

  Just as we were beginning to play, Uncle Frank asked, “Shouldn’t Kurt have made an appearance by now? It’s unlike him to miss something like this.” From that point on, though Isabella had only just made the first stroke, my interest in the game was overshadowed by a stronger interest in Uncle Kurt’s whereabouts. When would he come? I played with one eye on the door leading into the kitchen and flubbed my shots even more than I would have because of the warp.

  “We’ll never get anywhere if you play like that,” Pamela pointed out, her serenity undiminished. “Would you like me to play it all the way through?”

  “No, I want to play.” I was determined to be visibly part of the game when Uncle Kurt appeared.

  Tom and Isabella, the only sibling pair, soon took the lead. Isabella told me later that all the members of their family were fanatical players down in Boston and that she and Tom had devoted hours to improving the accuracy of their shots. They didn’t mention this at the time, though—they gave the credit to natural talent. “Never picked up a mallet before in my life,” Isabella said, flexing her thin arms. Neither Aunt Rose nor Uncle Cedric saw fit to contradict her.

  Charlie swooped up from behind and hit their ball with his. “Watch out—you’re going to be skunked,” he warned.

  “Let me do it,” said Francesca. “You hit her. I get to skunk her.”

  “You don’t know how.”

  “Of course I do! I’ve played before. My mother taught us, and she’s better than any of you.” Francesca put one dainty foot on her own ball and raised the mallet.

  “You’ll knock your foot off,” said Charlie. “Let me help you.” He wrapped his arms around her and put his hands over hers on the mallet. With one massive toe he nudged her foot off the ball.

  Francesca’s laugh rang out from within his embrace. “Charlie, we’re in public!” she exclaimed, and the aunts’ eyebrows rose. Then she said, “Get off me, you big bear,” and all the cousins began to laugh. A few glanced toward Aunt Edie. It was the undying joke of the summer, with just enough flavor of reality to give it punch.

  Aunt Edie was trying to dominate the blue mallet and finding strong opposition in Aunt Rose. My mother and Aunt Margery had dropped out after the first round. “What’s the use?” Margery said, near to fuming. “They’ll just shove us to one side when they think they can make a better shot.”

  Yvette, who could play a game with complete indifference or with competitive zeal but never with anything in between, had set her eyes on victory. It took her at least five minutes to prepare for every shot, and she ignored the shouts and groans of the other players. She would bend over her mallet, her blond hair falling in a curtain beside her face, her concentration like a fish cutting a line through a stream. Most of the time her shots were accurate, but she was still no match for Tom and Isabella.

  The kitchen door remained obstinately shut, and Uncle Kurt did not appear. At last I asked my mother about him. “Why won’t he come out? Doesn’t he want to play with us? I thought he loved croquet.”

  “Well, you know, dear,” she replied, “he’s working on writing something this summer. I think he finds it hard to concentrate with all of us here, and that’s why he has to lock himself in his room during the mornings. You mustn’t bother him when he’s working, but he’ll find time to play with the rest of us, don’t you worry.”

  “What is he working on?” I asked, intrigued.

  “Oh, he’s just writing something up. About the war, I think.” My mother waved her hand vaguely. She didn’t like to think about the war because it reminded her of Uncle Harold. The two of them had been very close, and when he died in the war, she had been so upset that she left my father and me for a time. At three years old, I felt her absence vividly, but I couldn’t miss Uncle Harold because I had never met him. He is another famous Hatfield figure, one whose legendary status can never be dimmed by the mundanity of a long life.

  Uncle Kurt, then, was consigned to his room. The croquet game suddenly held less interest for me, and I spent most of my time trying to figure out which window was his.

  Though he never appeared, there was still a late entrant to the match. Our surprise was doubled because the latecomer was a stranger, and her arrival cost Tom and Isabella the game. Tom had just lined up their ball for the last shot before a certain victory when I, happening to look at the woods, saw a solitary figure walking toward us through the grass.

  “Who’s that?” I asked, pointing.

  Everyone stopped and turned around. It felt so strange to have anyone in our midst who wasn’t related to us that we all stood still.

  A girl had come out of the woods. She looked to be about sixteen, with thick, light brown hair that fell in appealing waves on each side of her face. As she came forward she watched us intently, her eyes wide—and her eyes were enormous to begin with, their irises an unusual mixture of speckled blue and gray. They were her most noticeable feature, aside from the paleness of her skin. None of us could understand, once we learned who she was, how someone in her situation could be so fair. Her skin was not simply untanned but truly alabaster—there was not a freckle anywhere to mar its whiteness, and on the inside of her arms the blue veins were clear under the surface. When she first walked toward us she looked frightened, as if she were an animal drawn to something it knew was a trap.

  At last she gave us a cautious smile. Isabella was the first to speak. “Hello!” she called. “Who are you?”

  The girl waited until she had come nearer. Then, standing with her hands behind her back as if to present herself, she said, “Hello. Do all of you live here?”

  “We’re the Hatfields,” Aunt Rose said. “This is Shorecliff, our family home. Where have you come from?”

  “My name’s Lorelei,” said the girl. “I live on the farm beyond the woods, and I heard voices when I was walking. I thought maybe the house had been sold or rented for the summer.”

  “It’s still our house, but you’re right—w
e’re only here for the summer,” Isabella said. “During the school year we live in all different places.”

  “Do you mean you live at the old Stephenson place?” Aunt Edie broke in.

  “I’m Lorelei Stephenson,” the girl said, smiling shyly at Aunt Edie.

  “Fred’s daughter?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “I used to play with Fred when I was a girl,” Aunt Edie said.

  “You minx,” Tom whispered. Isabella and I were the only ones who heard. I looked up “minx” later in my dictionary—the definition was “a deceitful woman.” I assumed from this that Tom thought Aunt Edie hadn’t actually played with Fred.

  “How many of you are there?” Lorelei asked, glancing around at us.

  “Eleven cousins, eight adults,” Tom said. He had stepped to the front of the small crowd that surrounded her. “We’re playing croquet. Do you want to join us? You can play with me.”

  She looked at him, and it was as if we could see her heart fluttering in her chest. She was so transparent, physically and emotionally—so different from the Hatfields. “I’d like that very much,” she said.

  “You don’t need to play anymore, Isabella,” Tom said over his shoulder.

  Isabella put her hands on her hips and opened her mouth to retort, but her eyes flickered to Lorelei, and she said nothing. That was one of the things I loved about her—she never did anything that might hurt someone else’s feelings. When she said the wrong thing, which was often, it was usually because she was too enthusiastic or too confident that everyone would agree with her. But when she read situations correctly, she was always compassionate. “Go ahead,” she said, nodding to Lorelei. “The game’s almost over, but you can have a few shots.”

  “I’ve never played before,” Lorelei said, raising her eyes to Tom’s as he handed her the mallet. “I don’t even know the rules.”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “You’re just trying to hit this ball here through that wicket there with this mallet. That’s all.”

  They were like two actors in a play; we were all watching them. Lorelei hit the ball feebly, and it bobbled off at an impossible angle. Charlie, who had no compunction about taking advantage of others’ mistakes, roared with delight and plunged in to skunk the ball.

  Philip and Fisher ended up winning the game. Their partnership was a strange one, though typical of their personalities. Philip always wielded the mallet, but Fisher would scout out the distance to be covered and the angle at which the ball needed to travel. He would stand next to Philip like a surveyor and murmur advice to him: “Try to put a left-handed spin on it” or “Be careful of the tussock halfway to the wicket.” Philip and Fisher were the two quiet brains of the family, and their respectful friendship was one of the most understandable among us.

  Charlie’s thirst for glory having led him astray, the combined calculations of Philip and Fisher brought their ball to the stake, and the aunts, forgetting their own battle over mallet rights, congratulated them. Charlie stomped on his mallet with a good-natured bellow. Francesca, with an imperious toss of her hair, laid all the blame on his shoulders. As for Tom, he was still standing with Lorelei at the place where she had mishit the ball. Isabella, from a distance, watched them.

  I wandered over to her, wanting her opinion on the new arrival.

  “I think we’ve lost him,” she said, speaking before I could say anything. “What do you think of her?”

  “I think she’s nice,” I said. It delighted me that Isabella was treating me as someone with a worthy opinion, so I tried to sound grave. “But she’s not like us.”

  “No, she’s not like us.”

  Lorelei came often after that day, but we never knew when she would arrive or leave. Tom insisted that we hold croquet tournaments regularly, and he played with his head turned toward the woods. Being Tom, he continued to win often, in spite of being so obviously distracted, except for the times when Lorelei appeared. Then he would claim her as his partner and smile as she condemned him to second or third place. After that first tournament, the games were mostly between only five or six of us at a time. Pamela played only rarely, and the Delias usually bowed out. I tried to claim a mallet in every game but was frequently pushed aside by Philip or Francesca or Isabella. The aunts, probably because they knew how silly they had looked fighting over the mallet, never played again, though I often caught Aunt Edie observing our games with a gimlet eye.

  For the most part, Lorelei remained for me a character in the distance, a figure complemented by Tom standing possessively beside her. Once or twice, though, I got to speak with her alone. One morning Tom slept late, and so we weren’t dragged out onto the croquet field. I was on the lawn—by myself, since Pamela had opted to remain at the breakfast table—and, for lack of anything more interesting to do, I drifted in the direction of the woods. Lorelei appeared the way she always did, as if out of the grass. I waved and ran toward her. She wore clothes that emphasized her countryness—starched white blouses and skirts that flared out to well below her knees. Sometimes I thought they made her look old-fashioned, but most of the time she just seemed foreign—foreign to our family, our customs, our whole way of thinking.

  “Hello, Richard,” she said. She had needed to hear our names only once, and afterward she remembered them perfectly, never mixing any of us up.

  “We’re not playing croquet,” I said, coming to a halt beside her. “Tom wanted to sleep late.”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “I’m not good at it anyway.”

  “Yes, you are. You’re very good,” I said dutifully.

  “Liar,” she replied, smiling at me. Even when Lorelei said things like that, she seemed to be asking permission to say them, showing with her big eyes what a harmless creature she was. She never told us much about her life, but the aunts had interrogated her early on and established that during the school year she went to a girls’ boarding school in New Hampshire and that she wanted to go to college. My mother in particular was pleased that Lorelei was being “properly educated,” but to me and I suspect to the rest of the cousins, including Tom, she seemed entirely unsophisticated and natural. Aunt Edie called her, with some sarcasm, “Tom’s wood nymph.”

  “Do you think your family would mind if I came into the kitchen for a moment?” Lorelei asked. It was the first time she had ever requested anything or volunteered a wish of her own, and I was the one she had chosen to ask. This filled me with pride.

  “Of course you can come in. We’ll be happy to have you.” With which grandiose remark I led her into the kitchen to exclamations of delight from its inhabitants. She stayed for several hours that day before flitting away, refusing offers of lunch, shy of wearing out her welcome.

  All the cousins seemed to like her, though I sometimes thought Isabella begrudged her presence. I asked her about it once, having crept into her room when no one else was there. She was lying on her bed, looking at the ceiling, something she often did when she wanted to think. I sat at the foot of the bed and distracted her with idle chatter. When I mentioned Lorelei, a slight frown appeared on her face.

  “Don’t you like Lorelei?” I said.

  “Why? Is she downstairs or something?”

  “She and Tom went for a walk along the cliff.”

  Isabella propped herself on her elbows. “Yes, I like Lorelei,” she said. “Don’t you? She’s friendly and modest and sweet. I like her a lot.”

  “Really?”

  Isabella looked over the top of my head, which was usually the signal that she was going to unveil her innermost emotions. “The truth is, Richard, I like her a lot for herself, but I’m not sure I like her being here. It sort of takes Tom away from us, don’t you think? He’s preoccupied with her, and now he’s having this big adventure, and we’re…well…”

  “What big adventure?”

  It was the wrong question. Isabella burst out laughing and said, “An adventure into the unknown!” in her booming radio voice.


  She never brought up the topic again, and I knew only that the inarticulate desperation which was always a part of her character intensified and began to shine in her eyes whenever Lorelei came and Tom fawned over her. Isabella would stand apart in one of her gawky postures and look at them with her eyebrows wrinkled in unconscious dismay.

  She was not the only one displeased by Lorelei’s presence. I’ll never forget the croquet game when Yvette nearly killed Fisher. It was a five-man game—Tom, Isabella, Yvette, Fisher, and Philip. Fisher, with his usual earnestness, had advised me to stand on the sidelines and watch their strategies so I could improve my own skill.

  Lorelei appeared from the woods, and I called out for Tom’s benefit, “Here she is!”

  Tom’s face lit up. He waited, his mallet resting across his chest on one forearm, until she had walked up to us. She never ran. “Hi,” he said, smiling. I had taken to watching his face when he spoke to her. Tom had a signature grin, a big, unrestrained flashing of teeth, but he never showed it to Lorelei. The smiles he gave to her were subdued, as if he were holding something back or waiting for her to do something. Her smile, on the other hand, was the same for everyone.

  Tom said, as he always did after greeting her, “Do you want to be my partner for the rest of the game?”

  Lorelei nodded and said, “I won’t be any help to you.”

  From two wickets behind Tom, Yvette asked, “Why can’t she take the sixth mallet? We only have five players.”

  “Because I want her to play with me,” Tom said. He shielded his eyes to look at Yvette, who was standing with her back to the sun. “Besides, where would she start? We’re almost halfway through.”

  Inconspicuously, I circled around so that I could be nearer to Yvette. I had sensed from her voice that she was more upset than she wanted to show.

  “But she makes you lose,” Yvette said. “You’re always in the lead, and then you fall into last place because she’s so terrible.”